Three men
and one woman wake up chained in a warehouse with a director
and his lackey planning to feature them as victims in a
digital video snuff film The victims have had cameras
strapped to their heads to catch their own gruesome deaths
from their own points of view at the hands of a dim-witted
hammer and chainsaw-wielding Leatherface-wannabe in a pig
mask. Although the filmmakers (in front of and behind the
camera) are suitably repulsive, the victims do not command
much sympathy either and the viewer has ceased to care when
the twist is introduced in which the nameless, barely
glimpsed "protagonist" having to choose between sacrificing
himself to save his wife or saving his own skin by giving
the burned-out director a creative way to kill his wife.
There comes a point less than half-way through the film
after the off-screen deaths of the first two victims where
the Director says that it wasn't artistic and, therefore, a
failure. His cohort replies that it could be sold in other
countries such as the US since they're always looking for
bloody things. Whether one sees any artistry in it, whether
one deems it a failure, it was going to get released,
exported, and picked-up anyway and it was going to get
watched regardless of criticism (especially when even
unrelated films can be misleadingly marketed as "torture
porn"). It is not until the end that one realizes that the
film is being presented in the fictional mode as the film is
neither presented as "found footage" (there is no context
for the choice of when the film cuts from one camera to
another) nor as a "finished film" (in which one would think
the killers would edit their images out) so we are presented
with this cynical, mock-gruelling, mock-nihilistic
"endurance test" of an unpleasant film. As someone who has
not "seen it all," I still get the impression that even
those who have seen it all won't be shocked or impressed
while viewers assuming that this foreign-language production
represents an arty variation on HOSTEL and the like will be
sorely disappointed.

Palisades Tartan's DVD is
progressive and anamorphic with a consistent clarity of focus
and exposure that undermines the verisimilitude of the snuff
aesthetic as it is fabricated here (consumer digital video
cameras strapped to the heads of the victims taking as much of a
beating as the characters). THE BUTCHER's original audio track
is 2.0 stereo so that track is not a downmix and without a 5.1
track, there is no usual DTS track found on most Tartan releases
but one could argue that anything more than 2.0 would not be in
keeping with the film's aesthetic.

An alternate ending (a Texas
Chainsaw Massacre-esque tag to the film's ending) and trailer
are the only contextual video extras. The "making of" and
storyboard extras are both still galleries. Trailers for four
other Palisades Tartan DVDs are the only extras (though unlike
the old Tartan releases, the trailers are not individually
playable).